Fashion has lost its dressing sense.

60% of the fabric used by fast fashion brands are synthetics. These synthetic fibres end up in landfills, with 85% of textile waste in the United States unable to decay. Before we go deep into the debate, let’s answer: “What is Fast Fashion?”. Fast fashion is a term that describes cheap designs moving quickly from the catwalk to stores to capture and create new trends. As a result, we constantly see new trends and cloth from fast fashion brands such as Zara, Forever 21 and the likes that are cheap and that encourage us to always buy more. It is so rapid that we can’t even allocate our money to decide which piece of clothing to buy!

Treat sheep like they are wool machines

Now, let's look at why these brands are termed as unethical. There are several factors, a few of which I've mentioned here below:

1. Excessive freshwater usage while there's not enough for agriculture and drinking in some places.

2. Exposing workers to harmful chemicals and dyes during work hours, and flushing them into the environment- rivers, lakes, etc.

3. Short lifespan- cheap clothes which promise to be in trend with current fashion end up generating a lot of trash since brands design them to last only for a few wash cycles, after which they lose their durability and their colour starts fading.

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Initiatives like using ocean plastic to make shoes like that of Adidas, creating speakers from non-recyclable waste from landfills like that of the company called Gomi (https://www.gomi.design/), etc. need to be encouraged. It's certainly worth spending a few extra bucks on such products because you're spending on not just the products, but rather these are unique movements aimed at sustainability. These are a sensation of their own.

Brands which focus on sustainable and ethical fashion include Levi's (https://www.levi.com), Alternative Apparel (https://www.alternativeapparel.com/), Pact (https://wearpact.com/), Everlane (https://www.everlane.com/), thredUP (https://www.thredup.com/), etc.

With so many brands now focussing on sustainable and sensible fashion, there's a lot of choices for us to choose from, and I hope that the next time you buy clothes, you do so only if there's really a necessity to buy new clothes (second-hand buying is strongly encouraged for various reasons), you take a moment to realize how important every single purchase is and make a conscious and responsible choice, as a proper literate person. Of course, now that you know which brands deserve the consumers' support, the excuse of not knowing can't be entertained. I'd like to end with this quote, "Fast fashion isn't free. Somewhere, someone is paying the price".

P.S: I actually realized the necessity of sustainable fashion after this photo was taken, and have decided to dedicate all of my photography skills towards sustainability and planet-friendly responsible and sensible living, and would be covering more of ethical fashion, healthy diet habits from fitness freaks, and also people working on sustainability and environment-friendly initiatives and projects.